+++Rides of 2024+++Add yours here+++

[Andre Jute]

I watched part of the pre-race goings-on from the roof of the pits. (Imagine doing that today!)

What a charmed life you led, John.

Today the Mounty sniper on the tower will shoot you on principle before you can commit a terror attack. The security services are paranoid about overlooks and other heights. We used to be a lot freer in the last century.

Hey, Mike, your omelette-scarfing at the Royal in Durban reminds me of the Southern Cross Hotel in Melbourne in the early 1970s. The first reporter to interview me when I settled in Melbourne introduced me to their omelettes; they were served in only one of the restaurants, so you had to know where to go. But what impressed me even more than the omelette was that the weekend chef could make an outstanding split pea soup. I was disappointed when I discovered he too was a South African, as I had hopes of split pea soup being an Australian specialty -- nothing warms you through faster after a cold winter ride. The swill that you could get when the pubs emptied on Spring Street from a man with a cart, which had a meat pie in the so-called pea soup and was called "a floater", was "a national and international disgrace" according to Bruce Cavalier (you might remember him as the cartoonist Cav); I didn't try it twice for fear of becoming a floater myself. Buzz, the resident wit of our circle said, "The floater is an Oz manhood passage: if you hurl a duke, you lose."

[John Saxby]

Jeez, here we are 2 1/2 months after the last post: were there no "Rides of 2024" in the meantime?

A wee update, then:  Ron & I finished our tour of W Qué a month ago, and I've not done a lot of cycling since then, beyond errands on my city bike. We have had a serious heatwave, with humidex values in the low 40s, and I don't do outdoor exercise in such conditions -- imagine, I dunno, Dar-es-Salaam in January without the onshore winds. Beyond that, there's been far too much busy-ness going on, mainly in the form of maintenance -- roofing repairs (unplanned and a headache, but welcome), the usual electronic/digital niggles, and sundry bodily tuneups (essential, but happily, also manageable). 

And: some post-tour tweaks to Freddie. The whys and wherefores are due to appear in the last posts & photos of our tour, but briefly: in the last ten days, I've swapped out Freddie's 650B x 1.6" Marathon Supremes (now well into their third season, with no problems at all), plus their related Velo Orange fluted alloy fenders, for a pair of Panaracer 650B x 48 Gravelking slicks and matching pair of Velo Orange smooth silver alloy 58mm fenders.

I made a gentle preliminary riverside ride on Sunday: just an hour or so, but enough for a sudden short-but-heavy shower, which Freddie's enormous new fenders barely noticed.

Today, I rode across the river and "up the Gatineau" a ways -- my usual there-and-back to Pink Lake lookout.  Last Friday, we had about 22 hours of on-and-off rain, but in West Qué and especially in Montréal, the precip was altogether different.  Montréal set a one-day rainfall record with about 175mm.  All that water overwhelmed the city's storm sewers, and more than 500,000 people were left without electricity.  Closer to home, small villages just north of Ottawa declared states of emergency, and -- this was more an inconvenience than anything, it must be said -- the parkways in Gatineau Park were closed to all traffic.  That was mainly to allow maintenance crews to assess and repair any damage.

In the event, this afternoon I rode only as far as my shorty "aller-retour", and covered the 33 kms in rather less than two hours.

Three photos below show the highlights:  #1 is Freddie leaning against the wooden railings of the lookout at Pink Lake, showing off his fancy new oversized shoes and shiny fenders.  #2 is mid-August/late summer foliage -- everything green, with a fine blue mid-afternoon sky. Unfortunately, the lake is rather too green as well    (I first went swimming in Pink Lake almost exactly 60 years ago, and it wasn't green at all -- dark, 'cos deep, but no algae.  That's a more recent development, if "development" is the word I want -- a product of various chemical runoffs into the lake.) #3 is a more cheerful roadside patch of goldenrod.  This is considered a "weed", the name reserved for unwanted plants. In this setting, sez this passing cyclist, I think it enhances the roadside verge.  Further back in the day, growing up on a farm 300 kms southwest of here, I understood why many people considered it a weed:  it ripened about the same time as the season's crop of wheat, and a farmer does not want its seeds mixed in with his or her kernels of wheat.  Context is content, as always.

In the event, Freddie & his new tires handled the tarmac very well, and my lingering fitness from our July tour let me climb the hills at a BSE pace.

Longer rides to come n the weeks ahead, including a ride up the the "summit", Champlain Lookout, now that the roads are open again.

[Andre Jute]

Pink Lake looks like it is being choked off by that green blanket. The visibly watery spots under the trees however do give me hope that when the weather turns colder the algae -- or whatever has brought The Day of the Triffids to Pink Lake -- will die away.

Grand photos, as always, John. I especially liked the Goldenrod. I'm imagining some country council employee riding up on his bike with his fork over his shoulder, turning over a piece of the land, spreading the seeds out of his hand, and riding back into the dusk with his fork over his shoulder, whistling a folk tune.

No, really. When I was a boy grand figures like the town's health inspector, when my mother asked him to come deal with the bats in the lofts, and to give the builders instruction in where to block off their entry, arrived on his official bicycle. (Actually, he did none of that. He instead told my mother, "If you chop down those two loquat trees, the bats will follow their food and go bother the loquats and lofts of your neighbour down the hill.") His son was at school with me and let me ride his father's cast-off bicycle, "a real adult bike", two common marbles per ride, or two rides for one marble-shattering steel goonie of which I had arranged the exclusive supply by offering to help my dad build a monstrous camping truck over forty feet long, with a convertible BMW Isetta bubble car* on a ramp behind to go buy bread and milk, at an engineering firm -- with a very interesting scrapyard -- in which he'd bought an interest. Some years later I embarrassed the only local communist, Red Jim, in the year when it was his turn to be mayor, by exposing him in the newspaper for interfering in the perquisite of council employees when their bicycles were replaced to pass the old bike on to their sons. The town clerk, the guy with the actual power, issued an emergency declaration that the town council had no interest whatsoever in the old bicycles of their employees when they were replaced by new bicycles, and and that "all members feel strongly" that they were building bonds with sons who might one day inherit their fathers' jobs.

*This was the bubble car I later notoriously fitted up with a Jaguar 5.3 litre V12 from an E-Type I crashed, on rails out the back, replacing a 350cc BMW motorcycle engine... I also made a cycle-wheel (literally -- bicycle wheels from the scrap) electric car with a motor and batteries I found and sophisticated Ackerman steering, and used to drive it to the hardware store with shopping lists, and turned it into an electrical tricycle when the cops got bolshie. Mmm, so my current electric bike is my fourth electric bike.

[John Saxby]

Thanks as always, Andre - glad you like the goldenrods.  I reckon they must've been planted -- living with Marcia's garden has taught me that birds and squirrels aren't usually so orderly/tidy/compulsive in spreading the seeds of "weeds".  But I confess I hadn't given any thought to who might have planted that splendid golden streak.  The park & its roads and trails are the responsibility of the National Capital Commission (one of several levels of jurisdiction/agencies of governance in the Ottawa/Gatineau region).  Much as I applaud its restrictions on motor vehicles in the park (so as to promote "active transportation"), I find it hard to imagine a mischievous minor official gathering/hoarding goldenrod seeds, and then heading out on a bike before or after work to spread them along the verge.  But then, as Fats Waller would've said, "One never knows, do one?"

Isetta! Wow! That's a name rarely heard nowadays. A mate in high school had one.  We would play tricks on him by lifting it from his parking spot onto a sidewalk. In Canada, they were nearly as rare as a BMW single.  Then again, when I was teaching in Zambia betw 1969 and 1971, a friend had one of the original Honda Civics (was it called that?? blessed if I can remember), which had a 360cc OHC twin, lifted from the common and excellent 350cc motorcycle. (I think the 450 from the "Black Bomber" bike would've upended the wee car.)  We were visiting Botswana one time, near the point in the Zambesi where Zam, Zim, Bot and Namibia come together, with elephants wandering around in Bot and a machinegun nest covering the ferry to & from Zambia.  Stopped in the game park in Botswana, we were bemused and then slightly terrified to see an elephant approach the Honda head-on.  I said to my friend, "Er, put it in neutral, Hilary, and switch off the motor."  The elephant dipped its head and front knees, moved us a few feet backwards with its trunk, then turned away to strip some foliage off a tree.  We exhaled, then  e v e r   s o   s l o w l y  started the car and backed away.

Great times.

[Matt2matt2002]

John, I had a Honda Civic 45 years ago in Dubai. Called a rabbit, I think.

[Andre Jute]

John, I had a Honda Civic 45 years ago in Dubai. Called a rabbit, I think.

A Honda by the name of Rabbit? Doubtful, Matt, if only because the vW Golf was called a Rabbit in the States about that time; the booted version was called a Fox. Car companies don't like sharing even numbers (by common agreement, Peugeot has all the -0- numbers like 504, Porsche has all the 9-- numbers like 928, examples abound), never mind names.

John, BMW licensed the Isetta from the Italian Iso company; the BMW version was extremely well built (I don't remember ever seeing an Iso version before it presumably rusted away); ours was a little holiday car to go buy camping necessities and therefore a convertible, but there was no body shake and of course no rattles.

The first time I saw a Honda Civic it was a rather small hatchback c1970 but the engine IIRC was 1200cc, a proper small car. (I imagine it was sold in the Japanese home market with an 800cc or even a 600cc engine for tax reasons.) I agreed to test it for an Australian paper because it had what was then a huge novelty, an optional automatic gearbox in a small car the requirements of which explain the bigger-than-then-normal engine. I invited one of those guys who're always going on about how we should consume less (I didn't have a bike but he'd bring an extra to the door to induce me to cycle with him) to give an opinion. We tried for nearly an hour to get a common medium size road bike into the back and it wouldn't fit though the cardboard we used to protect the paintwork got pretty mangled. For comparison, the majority of small cars today will take a road bike when the rear seats are down, and you'll be able to close the hatch.

[in4]

I think there was a Nissan Cedric and also a Toyota(?) Fanny. Some names transit continents so well. Group think at its finest. Unofficially my Nomad is named Henry. There’s no implied reference to my relative corpulence or regard for monarchs. Rather it’s a reminder of my late labrador.

[Andre Jute]

I think there was a Nissan Cedric and also a Toyota(?) Fanny. Some names transit continents so well. Group think at its finest.

Another small Japanese car was a Jiminy. And a famous car that never was, the Toyo Motor Company's entry into America, with the ultimate group-think name: the Toyolet.

[in4]

Toyolet ! 🤣 🤣 Brilliant although you’ve unleashed my muse. I’ve heard there is now a Kia Starmer for the UK market. Apparently it’s got a  very quick reverse gear and a turning circle the size of a sixpence!

[Andre Jute]

“You might think that, I couldn't possibly comment.” — Francis Urquhart

Every time I see a photograph of Sir Keir, I fear he will dance into song, misquoting Gilbert and Sullivan as “I never thought of taking a tickey for myself at all.“ I doubt we will ever discover he is cyclist. I miss Boris’s elegant 1896 Pedersen already.

[John Saxby]

A full two months since the last post...

But we're past Thanksgiving now, and yesterday, the temps were in the mid-'20s, with a forecast pointing to a dramatic drop before the end of the week.  So, out of the shed and across the river and into the trees, in search of autumn foliage.  I rather knew what to expect -- a month back, I had made a similar ride, and the foliage had barely changed, so weird-and-wonderfully warm were the temps.  (With apologies The Usual Busyness pre-empted any post and photos.)

I'd hoped to do a longer ride than the usual up-and-down to Pink Lake, but The Usual Busyness allowed just a nice'n'sweaty two hours.  Since we had some serious deluges in the first half of August, we've had very little rain at all, and the woods in the Gatineau were sooooo dry.  No gurgling streams as I climbed the bikepath to the park, just stagnant pools amid rocks.

Dryness combined with rocky hills and shallow soil, and there was no spectacular foliage -- just muted browns, gold-and-bronze, and copper.

We'll have to rework Bliss Carman's ode to autumn in Eastern Canada:

     Along the line of smoky hills, the crimson forest stands.
     Along the line of dusty hills, the withered forest stands,
     And all day long the blue jay calls, throughout the autumn lands.
     And all day long the blue jay squawks,
     "Alright you humans, now you've bloody gone and done it!"

But I managed a couple of photos from the park that show the state of play -- see #s 1 and 2 below.  A splendid cobalt sky, but a bleached-out view due east from Pink Lake lookout. #3 shows Freddie leaning against his shed in our back yard.  The bright golden foliage shows what some rich clay/loam soil (the ancient river- and lake-bed, post-Ice-Age) and better watering will do -- all the rain off the northern half of our roof is channelled to the maple and locust in the photo.

All for this season, I should think.  The cold and frosts of November will soon be upon us, and with those, the dreaded black ice on the roads in the Gatineau.  And then, if the drought breaks, to be followed by snow enough for cross-country skiing.🤞

[Andre Jute]

That blue sky is indeed spectacular, but the trees behind Pink Lake seem some way from a consensus on whether autumn has actually arrived.

From habit we put the central heating on at the beginning of October, and I've thought several times about switching it off again because the daytime temps here have been 17 degrees C and over, totally out of order -- too high -- for this time of the year.

Looks like the autumn has arrived more firmly in your yard than at the lake.